Well that’s the end of our TFSA contribution room for the year. We finished maxing out both accounts (note there was a small error in Jan update that didn’t reflect a part contribution to my TFSA), so now we need to do some stock shopping.

Speaking of stocks the markets have done very well so far in 2015, which is interesting to note that the gains are exceeding our contributions…ah the joy of compounding! It’s nice to know that my money can grow faster than I can save it at times.

We plan to get started on our taxes here right away and try to get our refund a bit earlier this year. Normally I have had to wait until the bitter end to file because of the investment accounts, but I shouldn’t see any T3 slips this year as we moved everything into tax sheltered accounts a while back. The only sad part is this likely won’t happen again as we will run out any contribution room in our RRSP and TFSA accounts this year and so will be back to taxable accounts at some point in 2015. *sigh*

Overall in my life I don’t actually regret much. I’m fairly happy with where I am and what I’m doing but I have to look back at this particular period of my life as a bit of an exception. After all, I was free from my soul eating employer wasn’t I? No work to go to, lots of time to relax and kick back and guess what…I blew it.

What the F*&%$?!?!? You say. Yes, I blew it. I didn’t sleep in everyday, I didn’t read lots of books or catch up on watching movies…instead like a trained slave that was used to the beatings, when the master wasn’t there I flogged myself instead. My two major mistakes were:

I worried the entire time I was unemployed about money.

I treated my job search as a job.

The first one was somewhat defensible. I didn’t have a whole lot of savings at that point in my life and I owned a LOT of money between my wife and I. After all we had just under $60,000 in debt from university and I signed a $18,000 car lease which was also draining us monthly. So in fact, if I didn’t get a job when my Unemployment Insurance checks finally stopped coming in I would rapidly go from treading water to screwed in a matter of weeks. Yes my wife had a job, but given our expenses and limited savings we didn’t have a big cushion (and I wanted to avoid tapping our limited RRSP savings).

Aside: Also when looking back at these months I realized something….this was the genesis moment of my dreams of early retirement even before I found out about the concept. How? I realize now I never wanted to be in the situation of worry about money like that ever again. So later on in life when I did come across the idea of early retirement, it was extremely appealing to me.

Yet I do think I worried about this way more than I needed to, which lead me to my second mistake.

I had previously read some well meaning advice on job hunting that you should treat your job search as a job, which being young I assumed meant work on it for like 6 to 8 hours a day. So I got up each week day and pretend I had a job of finding a job. So I gave myself a few coffee breaks and a lunch hour but overall spent most of my days looking at job ads and writing up job applications, cover letters and redoing my resume.

Yes, I can see you shaking your head at the stupidity of it because frankly looking back I agree. I didn’t know that spending more time at something doesn’t always increase the productivity of the activity. In fact, I could have likely done just as an effective job search in perhaps 2 to 3 hours a day, but I manged to drag out the misery out to six or eight hours a day. See what I mean by flogging myself.

Then of course because of my worry about running out of money I would feel guilty when I did stop looking early any given day and it would just fall into a negative feedback loop. I won’t do fun things because of fear of running out of money, feel worse, still not have a job, feel even more guilty and clamp down even harder on our spending. Fairly sick eh?

Of course I as didn’t realize that engineer jobs looking for 2 to 3 years experience was particularly an endangered species, and I felt I was under qualified for the jobs that were looking for 5 to 7 years experience. Also keep in mind that after my last job, I was being a hell of lot more picky about getting a new job. I wanted to avoid oil and gas, which when you live in Alberta cuts out a LOT of jobs. So this likely went on much longer than it had to. In the end, what broke me out of this cycle was I decided to widen my job search to pick up just about any decent paying job (ie: higher pay than minimum wage) and I applied for a Customer Service Desk job at a chemical distribution company.

I still actually recall the exact moment I decided I wanted to work at that company. It happened just before the interview before I knew what the job involved, what it paid or even what the hell was a chemical distribution company. While I was waiting for the interview of the reception area I watched the staff come up the receptionist and chat with her. They joked, told stories and smiled a lot more than my previous workplace. It actually gave me a powerful sense of deja vu to how my immediate family treated each other.

So after two rounds of interviews I was thrilled to be offer a job and finally move out of my self imposed wasteland.

Summary

Lessons Learned

Working longer on something doesn’t make it better.

Worrying about things you can’t control is rather pointless.

Fear of running out of money can be a powerful fear.

Learn to have some fun once in a while regardless of your financial situation. You don’t have to break the bank having a good time.

Financial

Progress was non-existent at this point in life. If anything we went backwards for a few months.

]]>http://blog.canadian-dream-free-at-45.com/2015/02/27/a-history-of-labour-part-iv/feed/1http://blog.canadian-dream-free-at-45.com/2015/02/27/a-history-of-labour-part-iv/http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/canadian-dream-free-at-45/bjau/~3/Y1i4rm0ay9Q/Affordable Coffee from a K-Cup?http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/CanadianDreamFreeAt45/~3/paWsFeScPt8/
http://blog.canadian-dream-free-at-45.com/2015/02/25/affordable-coffee-from-a-k-cup/#commentsWed, 25 Feb 2015 12:34:53 +0000http://blog.canadian-dream-free-at-45.com/?p=6841Over the holidays I have a well meaning gift to my wife and I of a Kurig coffee machine. It’s just one brand of several types out that that use disposal coffee pods and at first I’m completely admit my first thought was: what the hell am I going to do with this?

You see I already know from using K-cups at work that the little pods are not cheap like around $0.75 to $0.80 per pod. So when you have already been drinking dripped brewed coffee for years why the hell would I want to spend a small fortune buying little expensive coffee pods?

Yet cost isn’t everything in life so when my wife suggested we give it a try before making up our minds I thought: oh why not? If it is bad, we just get rid of it.

Anyways, during our initial use of the machine I had to admit it was handy to have around when you just want a single cup of coffee. My wife particularly liked it after lunch since she usually just heated up the old coffee that was made that morning…which is you ever microwave old coffee you know that isn’t that good. For her she was getting a much better cup of coffee after lunch and since she only drank that one cup it didn’t make sense to make a second pot of coffee.

Yet the cost of those K-cups was driving me nuts…there had to be a better way. So I turn to good old Google for a solution and come across reusable K-cup pods (which apparently won’t work with the new 2.0 machines unless you hack them…just Google it). I’m like, oh ya! More less waste and you can use your own ground coffee in them so you can even have the same old coffee that I’m used to in my morning pot of coffee.

Except it appears some of them by design are a bit of pain to use as you have to replace one section of the machine to use them, which seems sort of pointless to me. Anyway after digging around in Amazon’s website I come across one that looks just like a regular K-cup. No parts to change out, just put your coffee in close the lid and brew. Also you can get two of these little reusable K-cup in a package for around $15. So I decide to give it a try and order them.

Well when I get them I had a look at them and it seemed fairly easy to use them. We played with the amount of coffee you need to add to get a damn close copy to the taste of my morning drip pot of coffee. Yet after that is is all good. The reuseable is easy to use and saves you a small fortune in buying all disposal K-cups. The only real downside the reuseable K-cup is you end up using a bit more coffee per cup than you would with a traditional drip brewer. So there is a bit of an increased cost to using them, but it isn’t huge by any means perhaps 1/2 tsp extra per cup, but this mainly because we like our coffee strong. I don’t have exact values, but I would approximate our savings as 60% less than a regular K-cup.

In our case this is saved by making a smaller pot first thing in the morning, so overall it likely not much more coffee usage in the house by having the machine in the house. I estimate the reuseable K-cups are about 20% more expensive than our usual drip pots of coffee.

Then my wife has a brain wave which I love…why not just buy flavour coffee in disposal K-cups. After all you never really want more than a cup of flavour coffee at a time (ok, at least we do). Also to limit our spending on this we choose to only buy the disposal K-cups with our spending cash. It should be a treat, not a everyday thing.

So all in all, I have to say I’m surprised to be agreeing to keeping the machine in the house. I noticed in the instructions that it can go from stone cold water to ready in just four minutes. So rather than keeping it on and plugin all the time I put it on a power bar and shut it down when we aren’t using it. That helps keep the power bills down from just leaving it plugin all the time.

In the end, it is possible to have one of these machines in your house and not spend a small fortune on K-cups. Just buy one of the reusable K-cup and take the extra 15 seconds to fill it up and empty after you are done. Does anyone else use these machines regularly? Any other tips to share? I’m still mostly new to this.

]]>http://blog.canadian-dream-free-at-45.com/2015/02/25/affordable-coffee-from-a-k-cup/feed/10http://blog.canadian-dream-free-at-45.com/2015/02/25/affordable-coffee-from-a-k-cup/http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/canadian-dream-free-at-45/bjau/~3/ZBdyJoLgE4c/The Roll Backhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/CanadianDreamFreeAt45/~3/Gidi3xRxpEU/
http://blog.canadian-dream-free-at-45.com/2015/02/23/the-roll-back/#commentsMon, 23 Feb 2015 19:54:46 +0000http://blog.canadian-dream-free-at-45.com/?p=6870Well in the interest of disclosure I felt I should update you all on my work situation. As I previously mentioned the company had planned on doing a wage freeze which has now morphed into a full on roll back of the raises they gave at the start of Feb. So it officially got worse. The good news is they are letting us keep the money for the first two months of the year and eliminating our raises on March 1.

Of course doing this way sort of goes against behaviour finance theory. You see people develop an irrational sense of value over something once they have it (even if it was just a coffee mug) aka the endowment effect. So taking it away after the fact is a lot more painful then perhaps promising it in the first place and never giving it to them. So I entirely suspect that they isn’t particularly what management wanted to do, but in fact were ordered to do by their political masters. I tend to believe our management is fairly smart and would have avoided such a pitfall in the first place if they could.

What was particularly interesting about the situation was the fact they haven’t eliminated the bonuses from last year…yet. Which to be honest I thought that would likely get axe first (even if this is the very first year for the program). In theory this money could be paid out at the end of March. Which is really weird because if my memory is correct the bonus pool was about double the size of the raise pool. So from a cost cutting point of view it makes a lot more sense to kill the bonus. This isn’t to say I’m holding out hope for getting a bonus, but perhaps that will be the next item on the chopping block. Which is why when planning for any given year, I never believe I will get a bonus until I see the cheque deposited in my bank account. I treat it as an nice extra if I get it…I’ve never depended on a bonus in my life and I don’t plan on starting now.

The reaction around the office was an educational experience as you could almost see who had the highest debt levels by their reaction to it (based on my extremely limited sample size). Which about that time, more than ever, made my extremely happy I had decided to build a healthy financial cushion. In my case, it sort of puts a minor wrench in my plans. While I had planned to put that raise to work to put a minor boost to my savings, I do have a few other tricks up my sleeve to hit my savings target of $60,000 this year. For example, I expect to get a healthy tax refund this year, but I haven’t accounted for that in my contribution target.

So in the the spring of 2002 I left my hellhole of a job and moved to the building next door which housed the training division. I have previously spent a lot of time here getting my initial training and generally liked the majority of the staff.

I was so happy to be out of my old job I didn’t particularly care that the new one was largely editing old Word document and updating screen shots for training manuals. I had just regular day time hours now and I got to see my wife more than just three days a month.

It literally took months for the horror of the previous job to bleed away. It’s almost interesting to me how much pain I was in because I didn’t fully process how utter crappy my previously job had been until I managed to leave it behind. I mean I actually saw colours again in the world around me, I could smile again and I actually had some interest in reading and otherwise the fun stuff of life. And this is despite the fact I was making WAY less money now.

So I happily edited, wrote and merged files all day long without much care that the work I was doing was going to eventually run out. Yes, this job had a shelf life. You see in my nativity of youth I didn’t even consider why I got the job in the first place. After all I was like three seconds away from quitting the company entirely. From the companies point of view this work out just perfect. Before the burnt out employee who happens to know the new computer system leaves out the gate to never come back you give him a transfer to another division and suck out all his knowledge and record it onto the new manuals and then you get rid of him.

Actually my boss at this point in time was a nice guy. I enjoyed chatting with him and I learned a fair bit about training people and writing manuals during this time frame. He even introduced me to one of my future hobbies of wine making. He had used to do it and sold me his old equipment for a fraction of the price of retail. I literally got everything I needed to start for around $100 when the corker itself was worth more than that used.

But being a nice guy doesn’t mean I could stay forever. I was blissfully ignorant of the fact they brought in a new guy and I started teaching him some of my job duties that it won’t end well for me. I had been looking for a new job anyway, but I still caught off guard after six months when I was told I was being let go. Ah ignorance, it’s dulls the pain of waiting for the axe to fall. They had the decency to at least term it a layoff so I could collect Unemployment Insurance while I continue to look for a new job.

Next up I was tossed into being unemployed.

Summary

Lessons Learned

It’s ok to have a rebound job. Something to fill in the gaps while you look for something better in life. After all you still have rent and food to buy.

You can learn something useful at just about any job.

In hindsight I figured out the warning signs of losing your job: you finish your tasks and aren’t assigned more, you started to train someone else on your work, and people start to avoid you like you have a disease (they can sense the pain coming and don’t want to be near you when the axe falls).

Financial Progress

Minimal at best. After being put on just my base salary with no bonus for doing a specific job my amount of take home pay dropped dramatically. Then with our regular bills and payments there wasn’t much to save.

]]>http://blog.canadian-dream-free-at-45.com/2015/02/20/a-history-of-labour-part-iii/feed/2http://blog.canadian-dream-free-at-45.com/2015/02/20/a-history-of-labour-part-iii/http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/canadian-dream-free-at-45/bjau/~3/fTXrJ8Upm1s/What’s It For?http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/CanadianDreamFreeAt45/~3/7SAonJst57w/
http://blog.canadian-dream-free-at-45.com/2015/02/18/whats-it-for/#commentsWed, 18 Feb 2015 12:22:28 +0000http://blog.canadian-dream-free-at-45.com/?p=6852You have likely already been reminded you should be investing some money in your RRSP today. How do I know that? It’s the season for it so most people via the 1000s of ads out there are told they really should be investing their money.

Why are you saving and investing the money at all? What is the purpose of the investment?

*silence*

Need a hand? Perhaps the answer is: to retire. Which is a good idea, but what does that look like?

*longer silence with confused look*

Far too often we save blindly because we fail to really understand what sort of lifestyle you want in your retirement. After all, depending on the lifestyle you want that will drastically change how much you should be saving and how early you can retire.

For example, let’s say you have a couple who is in their 50s and they have been really good savers and have $500,000 in investments and a paid off house. Do they need to work any longer? Perhaps it depends on the lifestyle they want.

If they choose a modest life of mostly hanging around the house, being involved in the local community helping out with a few organizations, reading a lot of books and playing with the grand kids, they don’t really shop a lot and when they do they tend to buy high quality items that last a long while…well depending on the exact numbers they could retire in a just a year or two. Yep, if they don’t need much income, perhaps $24,000 a year, they could potentially retire shortly.

But if they want to travel the world for four months of the year, enjoy shopping a lot and are real foodies that enjoy all the finer things in life. Again it depends on the exact number, but if they spend like $5000/month. They may very well have to keep working until they turn 65 or later.

It all depends on the why. Why are you saving? What sort of life do you want to lead and what is stopping you from doing that at least in part right now before you even consider retiring?

The illusion is that someone one choice is better than the other, when it fact, what matters most is which one appeals most to you. If you have never really spent on $5000/month when you were working, what on earth do you think you will be doing when you retire?

What do most retirees end up spending? It varies but on average they spend $30,000 to $40,000 a year. That’s it. No huge lifestyles of the rich and famous, but rather a modest but happy life having lots of time to do those things you enjoy.

You could do less than that if you want, especially if you consider your mortgage was paid off. So if you aimed for $30,000/year target you could be retired rather easily on $750,000 in investments. Yep, that’s it. Forget about the million dollar mark, you don’t need it.

So if someone tells you they need at least $2 million or more to retire…I would ask why? It won’t change the answer in some people’s cases, but more often than not they don’t understand the why and end up with overly large targets.

Instead, take the quicker way out…think about what you really want from your retirement and then plan around that. The more detail you can provide the better plan you can make. It won’t also be easy to do, but in the end you at least know exactly why you are putting money into your RRSP or TFSA.

What are you saving for?

]]>http://blog.canadian-dream-free-at-45.com/2015/02/18/whats-it-for/feed/5http://blog.canadian-dream-free-at-45.com/2015/02/18/whats-it-for/http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/canadian-dream-free-at-45/bjau/~3/JZi5dJ-fgNs/The Impulse Buyhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/CanadianDreamFreeAt45/~3/z50yDJFzsSE/
http://blog.canadian-dream-free-at-45.com/2015/02/17/the-impulse-buy/#commentsTue, 17 Feb 2015 12:56:56 +0000http://blog.canadian-dream-free-at-45.com/?p=6863I looked at my hand in confusion and was almost in shock.

“Did I just really do that?” I asked aloud.

I look at the screen again. “Yep”

I just bought a ebook on impulse. Oh my, is the world ending now? But wait this is the second impulse buy I’ve done in the last two months. I bought a DVD on impulse in January. Will I be struck down by a vengeful god?

Nope.

But in all honesty, both events were highly unusual for me. I’m so used to doing just about everything via delayed gratification that when I impulse buy I’m a bit rusty at the experience. It’s much more normal for me to consider a purchase for a while and then after a week or two finally buy it or not. At least when it come to consumer goods.

Food on the other hand I’m practically an expert in impulse buying. Most of my lunches out at work are not planned. In the grocery store I often pickup one extra item that I want, but don’t need and wasn’t on the list.

How do I justify this Jekyll and Hyde on my spending? It’s simple…I planned it this way. WTF?!?!

I know after many years of trail and error my week point in spending is books and movies. As such I tend to plan those purchases out a long time in advance. Typically at a minimum a few weeks, this tends to keep down the amount of both items I buy and forces me more often than not to use the library instead to try out something I’ve never seen or read. After that if I still like the book or movie a lot and it has a high degree of potential for watching/reading again and again then I will consider buying it. Even then I still tend to think about it for a while.

Yet exercising that degree of self control over everything I buy can be exhausting, so rather than try to control everything. I focus instead on my main weak spots and big purchases. Then I allow myself more slack when it comes to food purchases that I make with my spending cash. Buying a cookie because I want one isn’t a major issue so I’m not going to turn into one.

In the end, the impulse purchases above were notable since they were from my typical weak points of spending. To me it was a clue to watch myself a bit more in the weeks ahead to ensure I don’t slide into my old patterns of buying too many books and movies. Yet both purchases did point out something interesting to me.

The movies purchase was in fact season one of a TV show I had borrowed from the library and enjoyed a LOT. So when I came across it for about half price I decided on impulse to buy it. Do I regret it after the fact? Nope, not really. This brings up an interesting point for me. Should I consider the occasional impulse buy being okay if the item in question I would have purchases anyway and it is on for a deep discount? While this has the potential to be a slippery slope, I think I will allow myself a bit more latitude on these items in the future.

The second purchase of the ebook also brought up an interesting point. We had two older gift cards (like months old) in the house with only a few dollars left on them. My wife had just finished buying some ebooks and used up one of them. So I took a look around and bought an ebook on impulse to use up the other gift card. I found one that looked interesting and was rated fairly good on Goodreads. What this showed me was I tend to have a disconnect around gift cards compared to actual cash, since I don’t think I would have bought the book if I had been paying with my credit card.

That particular effect is rather well known in academic circles as the pain of paying (see here for a description from Dan Ariely). The more disconnected we are from cash the less careful we are with the money. In the world of pure reason, a $1 on a gift card is exactly the same as a $1 cash but in real life we treat them differently. We are more willing to spend a gift card than cash.

I had thought since I knew about this issue that I had made so progress on overcoming it…while the ebook purchase proved me wrong on that front. Ugh. Anyway, lesson learned I need to keep up the controls about spending especially with gift cards since I tend to be a bit more lose with spending them.

In the end, an impulse buy is only bad if you treat it that way. You don’t have to control yourself at all times, but I do recommend some rules of engagement that you create for yourself to help you out with your problem areas of spending. It won’t be perfect, but it should help cut down on the junk purchases in the long run. Just don’t freak out when you break your own rules…use them instead as a means to learn why you did and if any changes are required.

How do you manage your impulse buying? Do you use any rules for it or not?

Well after doing the service industry job and getting promoted to the first rung of the ladder I left my prospects in to seek out an engineering job. Yet oddly enough the job found me.

My university offered a service where they would keep your resume on file for a period of time after you graduate. Then some employers would come around and look through the stack to fill entry level positions. So while I didn’t apply for the job in question, I did attend the interview when I was called in …regardless of the fact I didn’t have the slightest clue what the hell a ‘Wireline Engineer’ did exactly.

I went into the interview nervous as hell but somehow didn’t manage to make complete ass of myself. They called back in just two days and offered me a job and even then I only had the vaguest idea of what the position involved. I knew the company was a wireline service company which had something to do with oil and gas production, but otherwise I was fairly damn clueless going in.

On top of this I was asked to pick which division I wanted to work for: cased hole or open hole. They could have offered me the choice between red or blue for that that meant to me. The recruiter summed it up as follows: open hole tends to make more and works with radioactive sources but also does more round the clock work. Case hole is more daytime work and works with explosives. Holy crap?!?! Nuclear sources…I like my DNA just were it is thank you very much I will take the explosives and more daylight hours. Thanks to my previous job I knew I wasn’t a big fan of working late at night.

This apparently is fairly common for this industry, so they hire a bunch of potential candidates and put them through a ‘school’ teaching them the core of the work involved. Then turn them loose to shadow an experienced guy for a few months to learn the ropes. The entire process takes anywhere from 6 to 8 months.

The school part I did well at after all when you have been doing that as your main job for four years. I also finally learned a bit out what the hell I would be doing finally. For those not familiar with the oil and gas industry I will do a brief overview of this part of it.

Oil and gas rigs come in two main types: drilling and service. Drilling rigs are the ones the drill the oil and gas well initially. After they reach their expected target depth, they bring in an open hole wireline crew to run some high tech tools to provide the geologists back in head office with data on the newly drilled hole buy running various tools on the end of long wire down the hole. Hence the term: wireline. That data they collect is termed the log, which is then used when they want to put that new well into production.

Once the metal pipe is put into the newly drilled well, it is now a ‘cased hole’. Any work done at this point is usually done by a service rig including bring in a case hole wireline crew to perforate (ie: blow up with explosives) small holes in the desired formation to start production of the natural gas or oil. Then once that formation stopped producing enough they would cement that off and proceed to blow up the next highest formation and repeat. So I blew holes in the ground typically 1 or more kilometers underground. Sounds exciting expect for at the surface if you do your job right all you notice if you wire line bounce up a down slightly after the explosion.

Now you need to understand the entire oil and gas industry in Alberta…they all wanted it done yesterday. Demanding clients would be a general understatement, not to mention anything of my bosses as well. Then on top of it all when an engineer is deemed competent you also get to run your own truck with two operations assigned to you. I got minions! Expect they were usually several decades older than me and hated me at first sight. Why? Well because not all the trucks were run by actual engineers, some of the operators learned enough over the years to get promoted. So when I 23 year old fresh out of university kid takes what you thought you had a shot at for a job it tends not to go well. Then on top of this I had a on call cycle I worked 15 days on and then had 6 off in a row.

The hours of work during my days on were nothing but insanity. I mean I literally worked once just over 24 hours straight with no sleep and we routinely worked 15+ hour days. Then on top of that I would also get paged during the night to suddenly show up at work in the next few hours even in the middle of the night. Why? Well because you had to go the shop to load up the truck with the equipment needed, drive usually a few hours to the job site, wait for the rig to be ready for you, do the job (finally!) and then go back to the shop and clean up everything so the truck was ready for the next run. Often we didn’t even come back to the city, they would direct us to another job directly and then ship out the extra equipment needed with a delivery service.

Aside: Particular astute people might ask about labour laws and my employer can’t do that to me. In progressive and enlightened societies you would be correct, but in Alberta in that job I was exempt for those laws. Heck even my operators had work around clauses for hours driven. Alberta sold its soul and people to the Oil and Gas industry years ago.

Ironically I had learned this pace was actually an improvement. Management had finally figured out that letting us sleep was actually saving them money periodically since we didn’t roll over our trucks which would then cost at a minimum $1,000,000 to fix. Before that rollovers from drivers falling asleep had been a fairly big issue. See that nice people I worked for?

So it didn’t entire surprise me when I learned from one of the nicer operators that in fact when you worked out all the math because of the insane hours we routinely put in we only earned like $12 to $14/hour. So in theory I was well paid for what I did, but in fact I had no life.

In fact during my first day off, I would typically spend it napping/sleeping to achieve the faint feeling of having caught up on my sleep. Then I would decompress a bit over day two off and finally enjoy a bit of life. Perhaps my only saving grace during this particular form of employment torture was the fact my wife had a three day on and three day off schedule so at some point during my days off we would get three days together.

Then on top of this I learned after getting there that because of the low amount of actually engineering work I was doing that my time working at this company would only count for half credits towards getting my actual professional engineer status…yes, I would need to put in not just four years of work experience at this employer but eight instead. This place was starting to sound like a prison sentence.

Perhaps one of the saving graces of this job was their were upgrading the computers used to do the logging work we did which had the potential to cut the amount of time we were onsite in half (in some cases). I got to play around with the new system since I actually could understand working in a Linux environment with four desktops doing four different things at once. Most of the older operators who had been promoted to running their own truck were having problems wrapping their heads around the new technology.

Yet after a while I realized I had a problem. My days off were no longer about a life, it was get some sleep, see my wife for a bit, watch a tonne of TV and movies since I had no energy for anything else and then go back to work. Then repeat. I actually at this point understand the mindless existence of the average consumer since I was living it (but I won’t consider it actual life, but rather a pale imitation half life at best).

Then I started to hit a brick wall. I was no longer enjoying my last day off prior to going back to being on call. I started to get physically ill each time thinking about going back to work. Yes like stomach in knots and headaches. In hindsight, this was an obvious sight of stress overload and being burnt out, but at the time I was young and stupid and it took a few cycles of this for me to start to realize this was a problem.

The straw that broke my back was working on one job we had an accident and because of my actions one of my operators almost got seriously injured. That was my wake up call. I couldn’t justify this insanity any longer. I had no job lined up (like how? I couldn’t look for a job when I worked all the time).

So I walked into my manager’s office with my letter of resignation in hand.

“I’m quitting.” I said.

“Why?” They asked.

“The real reason or what’s on the letter.”

“The real reason.”

Even I wasn’t stupid enough to tell them the job was insane…hello I needed a reference from this lunatics still. So I had already planned for this one and said “I like being married more than my job.”

They nodded in understanding. Divorces among my co-worker were so common it wasn’t even funny and in fact my relationship with my wife was getting strained.

Then they surprised me by adding, “Before you hand that letter over go see the training division next door.”

“Um, ok.” I replied.

Then I found out they needed someone who understand the new computer system to re-write the manuals and so I ended up with a job transfer. I never did submit that resignation letter.

Lessons Learned

You body and mind do have an upper limit of hours work and stress you can handle. It’s much higher than you would think.

Pay doesn’t always matter. Consider the hourly rate of pay when picking or keeping a job.

You should never let yourself keep a job you hate. It doesn’t matter the pay if you HATE your job.

The good news about this job is set out a whole series of things to avoid the future, so while it sucked it was extremely useful to find all this out early in my career.

Financial Progress

I didn’t keep good records at this point in my life, but I can say I didn’t save much or pay down much debt. I was spending a fair bit in an attempt to cope with my job.

The good news was I did sign up for the group RRSP and took the free money that went into it.

]]>http://blog.canadian-dream-free-at-45.com/2015/02/13/a-history-of-labour-part-ii/feed/2http://blog.canadian-dream-free-at-45.com/2015/02/13/a-history-of-labour-part-ii/http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/canadian-dream-free-at-45/bjau/~3/K6VTQaWa8mo/The Winter Blueshttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/CanadianDreamFreeAt45/~3/JTBlhicT1o8/
http://blog.canadian-dream-free-at-45.com/2015/02/11/the-winter-blues/#commentsWed, 11 Feb 2015 11:41:21 +0000http://blog.canadian-dream-free-at-45.com/?p=6859It’s been cold and dark for weeks now and it is started to impact my mood. I realized just the other day my capacity for enjoying life seem lower than normal. It was like the sun had been put on a dimmer and everything just looked a bit more gloomy. Or that things at work that would normally slide right off me have been pissing me off. I’m not even going to suggest I was anywhere near depression, but rather just a mild seasonal case of the winter blues.

For me this isn’t a normal occurrence, but rather the result of a series of unrelated events that created a perfect storm for me to feel a bit down. Individually these are all minor events, but they all compounded to make me feel down:

My work has several tight deadlines towards the start of the year.

Everyone around me at work keeps telling me about their trips to somewhere warm such as Florida, Dominican, Hawaii, California…you get the idea.

We have had a few recent periods of extreme cold where basically I’m rarely outside for more than 15 minutes in a day for a week straight.

I haven’t taken much time off since getting back to work after the New Year.

Our weeks have been a bit busier than normal between kids events and volunteer commitments, so I’m not getting my usual amount of downtime in a the last few weeks.

So what changed to break me out of this? Well the first event was realizing that I was feeling down. Odd as that sounds realizing that I do have an issue is half the battle. After that I could actually take some proactive management of the issue. I’m not suggesting any of the following will work for everyone, but rather what I’m doing to help me get back more to normal.

Stop focusing on the negative. It can be easier to get sucked into a world where all you seem to do is focus on what isn’t going well in your life. The reality is that my situation hasn’t really changed, only my approach to things. So first up was try to consider the positive of the situation rather than jumping to the negative. Life is actually fairly damn great for most of us if you think about it.

Do something I enjoy. Read a favorite book, watch a great upbeat movie or go play with my kids (like build Lego, go sledding or skating). Don’t just brood in front of the computer reading the new headlines or think about my taxes.

Take some time off. I’m coming up at a long weekend right away so I’m planning on making sure I structure my weekend to maximize our free time. Also when I can I’ll try to take an extra day off soon to make a random long weekend.

Get outside. Over a long cold snap it is easy to hide indoors for a while, but when we get even a moderately nice day I need to go head outside for a walk. Since the sunlight and the exercise will do wonders for me.

Celebrate something. Perhaps an unbirthday, or maybe this Wednesday needs a little party in the house. It doesn’t have to be anything meaningful, but rather just a reason to eat a good meal, laugh with some friends and have a good time. Heck, even having a movie night with the kids can be a great time.

The trick for me overall is to break out of the cycle of feeling bad. I find it just turns into a endless cycle of feeling worse and worse if I just let this condition fester. Negative feelings can just feed on itself if I don’t interrupt the process. Just making an effort to change things often can help me move on to feeling better about life.

So do you ever get the winter blues? If so, on a regular basis or just once in while? How do you break out of it?

]]>http://blog.canadian-dream-free-at-45.com/2015/02/11/the-winter-blues/feed/6http://blog.canadian-dream-free-at-45.com/2015/02/11/the-winter-blues/http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/canadian-dream-free-at-45/bjau/~3/3qxmLBa9IdI/Smacked by a Wage Freezehttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/CanadianDreamFreeAt45/~3/7NR2D1hm8gA/
http://blog.canadian-dream-free-at-45.com/2015/02/09/smacked-by-a-wage-freeze/#commentsMon, 09 Feb 2015 12:52:22 +0000http://blog.canadian-dream-free-at-45.com/?p=6850Oh dear me, this is just funny to me. Our beloved premier in SK just announced that he is putting in place a wage freeze…which also happens to include my position as well. This is so utter idiotic I can barely stop laughing. Why?

Well to put it bluntly, I just got my raise… just last week. So this will have utterly no impact until Jan 1, 2016 or so when I don’t get a raise next year. Also the amount of the savings from this move is a mere $15 million dollars when the entire budget short fall in predicted to be $600 to $800 million dollars which puts the savings in the range of 1.9 to 2.5%…or nearly nothing. To put that in perspective it’s like saying you plan to buy one less coffee out a week when you need a new roof on your house and have to replace your car in the same year, but have no savings in the bank and maxed out credit cards.

The reality of the move is entirely optics. There is nothing of substance but rather the illusion of trying to be prudent with our tax dollars after being on a drunken spending spree in this province for the last several years (spending from 2008/2009 until 2014 increased 54%, see here for data). And the cynic in me things this is the perfect way to set the stage to push all the unions to accept a 0% increase in their next contracts.

Anyway, the particular really stupid part of this move is they have failed to consider what they just did for a significant number of their employees: remove any motivation for them to even attempt working harder for the next year. In my case, my performance goals have barely had the ink dry on them and now you tell me regardless of how well or horrible I do in the next 11 months I will get the same wage increase of 0%. Just think about how much productivity is going to drop in the next year because of this little stunt, I can barely imagine the additional costs. The cost to productivity will easily remove any of the savings in over the course of the year.

Oh well, perhaps I should be grateful their aren’t more manipulative and had said that almost everyone would get a 0% raise except maybe the best performers…then take that away at the end of the year…or give them just 1%.

The good news is as long as I hit my saving target over the next few years the raises are largely not required for my early retirement plan to work. It just removes a bit more of cushion to the numbers.

So have you ever been under a wage freeze? How long did it last for you? (Or worse yet, a pay cut?)